UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

                                                        - Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

I so love quoting the good doctor.  Theodor Seuss Geisel had a playful, delightfully crazy style of writing and illustrating stories.  He buried his wit and wisdom in a weird, fantasy world of creatures and language that were all his own.  Children couldn’t get enough of it.   Adults who were still kids at heart, ditto.  The others thought it was just weird.

My kids had almost every book he wrote, and knew about the others.  We were a family of devotees. (My songwriter son even wrote a score for The Lorax with a grant he received, then found out that Livent Inc. had the rights to the story and was not about to give them up.)

That portentous ‘Unless’ quote may well become Seuss’s most famous words, as our world spins into an uncertain future.  Even now it has become the wake up call from eco-activists.

A few years ago I read The Lorax aloud to a group of adults and was surprised to find many of them in tears as I finished.  Mind you this was a select group of what I’ll call ‘Earth conscious’ individuals.  But the story of the desperate, unheard and unheeded Lorax is a cautionary tale if ever there was one. 

Earth Day, April 22, 2015 rolls around this week.  In the school where I teach there is, in fact, blazing from a big, blue bulletin board, the Lorax himself, spouting those same words for which he is now famous.  Seeing it was almost bittersweet for me.  Another generation reading the unchanged words, originally written in the mid-sixties.  (Theodor Seuss Geisel was ahead of his time.)

It can feel like we’re pedaling backwards. 

Many of us can identify with that drole little Seussical character of the big mustache and the warning words.  It feels as if no one is listening but the choir, who already know.  David Suzuki put it graphically about 10 years ago when he commented that, “We’re all in a car traveling at breakneck speed to the edge of a cliff, and the only ones paying attention are all locked in the trunk.”

Who is going to step up to the plate and take the lead in staving off the crisis of burgeoning carbon in our atmosphere and oceans, desertification of our land, extinction of species, and the water and food insecurities that are coming?  It does not appear that governments are up for that.  So it must be a grassroots movement. 

The segment of our population to whom we usually look for leadership is the middle aged one.   But the majority of that group appears too busy making a living and managing families to stop and ‘see the forest’.   So by default the responsibility is now dropped to the groups on either end – the millennials and the elders.

Millennials are smart and aware.  I see many of them as ‘old souls’, but they do not have the leverage, experience or status to turn around the mess we’re in.  That is where the elders come in.   They have all of those properties.  And they have time.

We need a legion of Elder Corp enhanced by that new generation of millennials to lead us into the evolution of this Earth.  Those of us in the second half or even fourth quarter of our lives, who have wisdom and experience just waiting to be called forth, are the obvious choice. 

We are dying to be needed and valued, here in the West, as tribal elders and those of other cultural extractions are respected around the world.  Let us take up the banner of wise leadership and step out into the world with our hearts on fire! 

This is a clarion call to love this Earth and the next generation of all species enough to step forward into your shining hour, using all the knowledge, awareness, understanding and skills that a lifetime has provided.  We can reclaim our spiritual voices and heal the soul of the world.  There is our reason to celebrate Earth Day.

Want inspiration?  Watch documentaries.  Read Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Bruce Lipton, Thomas Moore, Michael Meade, and especially Barbara Marx Hubbard who at 85 is what Deepak Chopra calls “the voice of conscious evolution”.  She is a living example of vitality, creativity and the possibilities present for all of us who are aging.

And revisit The Lorax.  Get your kids or grandkids to read it to you for real impact.  They are depending on us, you know.   “Someone like you . . .”